


Fall

by angel_0_darkness



Category: The Lady or the Tiger? - Frank Stockton
Genre: Alternate Ending, Blood and Violence, Graphic Description of Corpses, Not Happy, Other, Unhappy Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-02
Updated: 2019-11-02
Packaged: 2021-01-16 19:10:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21276257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angel_0_darkness/pseuds/angel_0_darkness
Summary: We were told to write an alternate ending to Frank Stockton's "The Lady or the Tiger?" and this happened.





	Fall

The princess flicked her hand towards the right door and watched as her lover made his way towards it. He gripped the golden handle of the twilight painted door before shutting his eyes, praying to who or whatever out there would listen to his pleas. Not having the courage to meet his fate head on, he looked away before pulling. 

Beneath the right door waited a young girl, dressed in a fine, white dress, ready for her upcoming wedding. Once the light touched the cellar down where she was, the girl ran up to the princess’s lover and hugged him tightly. The force of her hug sent them both careening back and the audience could see her white dress billowing outwards. They cheered for the innocence of the youth as the bells rang their sweet sound and a priest walked into the arena. The princess looked down at her lover embracing his new wife, and in that moment he looked up too. The princess appeared eerily calm as bells rang and children strew crimson petals onto the ground. 

Externally the princess was the perfect picture of calm, yet inside she was in a fit of jealousy. This was the option that she had chosen, the plan that she had concocted, yet here she was, internally screaming at the young girl embracing her lover. She calmed herself by taking deep, measured breaths and going over her plan. It was a long term one. One that would require weeks of observation and surveillance before it even had the possibility of running smoothly. As days melted into weeks, and weeks faded into months, the princess’s lover lived in peaceful happiness with his new wife. They found a kind of rhythm together, much to the delight of his wife, but he could not stop thinking about the princess. He remembered that face of picture perfect calm everytime he closed his eyes, and if he knew her, something big was about to happen. After months of observing her lover’s wife, a simple court girl, the princess deemed that it was time to strike. She sent her lover a letter, the first form of communication that they had in months, telling him to not be home at a certain time on a certain date. He followed her words and spent that entire day away from his house, working, shopping, even just watching ducks swim in a lake. 

Once the day had darkened and the moon was high up in the sky, the princess, dressed in all black clothes, approached her lover’s house. She picked open the front door and quietly made her way towards the kitchen. She hid under the kitchen table, black clothes and shadows obscuring her. Soon the princess heard footsteps making their way towards her. It was the court girl, who, having stayed up all night waiting for her husband to come home, wanted to grab a midnight snack. The princess drew a small, sharp dagger from among her clothes, and watched as slippered feet appeared in her line of sight. She waited, and waited, and waited, until the small feet turned and started walking away. With as much care as she could the princess rose from her spot under the table, walked three long, quiet steps, and grabbed the court girl’s shoulder. The girl whirled around, surprised, and the princess put her hand on the court girl’s mouth, silencing the upcoming scream. The princess struck with quick precision, cutting a long and deep line through the court girl’s neck. Blood gushed out from wound, making a mess of the kitchen floor and the princess’s clothes. Fortunately for her, dried maroon blood blends in well with black clothing.

The princess took the corpse to a hole that she had previously dug, and flung it into the ground before refilling the hole. After this was done, the princess went back to her lover’s house and mopped up the place before spraying the room with sweet perfume to mask the metallic scent of blood.

Soon after that, the princess and her lover continued their secret meetings. Her lover wasn’t surprised when his wife suddenly disappeared for this was one of the outcomes that he had predicted. The princess would get what she wanted, no matter the cost. Most secret, hidden things eventually come to light, and so too did their little affair. The king was furious when he found out and he plotted, not unlike his daughter, the murder of her lover. Unlike his daughter, the king’s plan wasn’t as thought out or as stretched out. He simply needed a sharp weapon and the location of this man. With a bizarre stroke of luck the king found his daughter’s lover as he waited by the castle for her, and without any hesitation, killed him. Now a king must kill with dignity even if in cold blood, and so his weapon of choice was an ax, and if one knows a thing or two about kings, one would say that he beheaded the man. That, indeed, happened, but because of the timing and abruptness of the cut, it wasn’t clean, and once the head was off, there was a tiny divot left in the lover’s neck from where the ax didn’t strike true.

The princess found out about this in due time. Grief stricken, she grabbed the same knife she had used to kill the court girl to slash her own throat with, much in the same way that the court girl had died. The king thought that this was fair, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Especially for seeing each other even after his daughter’s lover had escaped the jaws of death. Weeks passed, and the king started to grow lonely. While there were many people living and working in the castle none of them bothered the king in fear of angering him. Overcome with his loneliness the king jumped off a spire on the castle, ending his life on top of the very earth he had buried his daughter under. 

News of a dead king filters slowly throughout a kingdom, and with this news the kingdom started to crumble. With no king the people had no idea what they were supposed to do. Chaos raged in the streets day and night, anarchy sitting itself in the former king’s throne. A neighboring kingdom saw an opportunity to try and conquer this one. Unfortunately for them, the siege failed and all of the kingdom’s residents were killed by the invading army. Soon enough the invading kingdom saw that this one wasn’t worth their time and effort to cultivate and control. They abandoned it and left to continue expanding their empire elsewhere. As time marches on, people, places, objects, erode and fade away. Nothing much was left of the old kingdom except a valley full of rotted and half destroyed structures. Animals made their home in these ruins, finding shelter from the weather. Greenery grew in the rubble, vines snaking their way up half destroyed walls. The one structure not destroyed is a circle of rocks, standing proud, and in the middle of that circle are two doors, both the same, sitting side by side for eternity.


End file.
